Abstract Twenty-eight boys and 28 girls at each of the Piagetian preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational cognitive stages were given an interview focusing on their concepts of family. Half of each group were from intact families, and half were from divorced families. Interviews were scored for two structural aspects of the concept of family: conceptual level, and use of dimensions that structure the concept. The complexity of children's concepts was strongly related to cognitive stage and, to a lesser degree, to sex. Frequency of use of concept dimensions was strongly affected by general developmental level, though not specifically cognitive stage, and by intactness of family, but to a lesser degree by sex. Specific information is provided on the effect of these factors on perceptions of family composition, parental roles, and breadth of family activities.
Cognitive Science is founded on notions of representation, and shifts in models of representation have constituted the major internal revolutions in the field. Symbol System and related conceptions were long dominant, but the frontiers passed first to connectionism and more recently to autonomous agent orientations. In spite of its foundational role, representation has never received a consensual or adequate characterization within cognitive science. This is not surprising, given that millennia of effort in philosophy have also failed to achieve consensus or adequacy, but the situation nevertheless constitutes something of a scandal or impasse in a field in which representation is so central. More recently, workers in dynamicist and utonomous agent approaches have argued that representation is not even a useful notion. I argue that this confusion and impasse oncerning representation is due to a fundamental misconception about the nature of representation, and offer an alternative model.
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A problem of action selection emerges in complex and even not so complex interactive agents: what to do next? The problem of action selection occurs equally for natural and for artificial agents for any embodied agent. The obvious solution to this problem constitutes a form of representation, interactive representation, that is arguably the fundamental form of representation. More carefully, interactive representation satisfies a criterion for representation that no other model of representation in the literature can satisfy or even attempts to address: the possibility of systemdetectable representational error. It also resolves and avoids myriad other problematics of representation and integrates or opens the door to many additional mental processes and phenomena, such as motivation.
This chapter outlines dynamic models of motivation and emotion. These turn out not to be autonomous subsystems, but instead are deeply integrated in the basic interactive dynamic character of living systems. Motivation is a crucial aspect of particular kinds of interactive systems — systems for which representation is a sister aspect. Emotion is a special kind of partially reflective interaction process, and yields its own emergent motivational aspects. In addition, the overall model accounts for some of the crucial properties of consciousness.
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